Supermarket Censors Elton John And Baby Magazine Cover

24/03/2011 15:24
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Updated
22 May 2015

Kelly Rose Bradford
Parentdish UK

A US supermarket chain censored a magazine that had Elton John, his partner David Furnish and baby son Zachary on the cover.

The 65 shops run by Harps Food Stores reportedly covered the magazine in plastic bearing the words 'Family Shield to protect young Harps shoppers'. The covers are usually used for pornographic publications.

The mag - US Weekly - shows the happy dads cuddling surrogate baby Zachary, who was born on Christmas Day.

Gay campaigners voiced their outrage at what they called blatant 'homophobia', whilst customers took to Twitter and internet message boards to voice their concern at the censorship, eventually forcing the store's president to back down and remove the packaging.

Company boss Kim Eskew said: 'We reviewed the magazine in question, removed the shield and are selling the magazine in all our locations today without any cover. Our true intention was not to offend anyone in our stores and this incident happened at just one of our 65 locations, which, when brought to our attention, we reversed.'